Not Working: State, Unemployment, and Neo-Conservatism in Canada

Raymond B. Blake is a history professor at York University.

McBride believes that the first economic priority of the state should be
the provision of full employment. This was, in theory at least, the goal
of the Keynesian policies that were followed by Canadian governments
from the Great Depression to the early 1970s. However, Canada has moved
from an era of relatively full employment to one in which the
unemployment rate ranges between an acceptable level of 7 and 10
percent. McBride argues that the current levels of unemployment have
been determined in large part by the political choices made by the
government.

In attempting to explain how this happened, McBride has produced a book
on the political economy of unemployment that incorporates much of the
policy paradigm literature and neo-Marxian state theory. An emphasis on
paradigms, he claims, puts ideology squarely back into the policy
process. And what the Canadian state experienced in recent years was the
replacement of a Keynesian paradigm by a monetarist one. This led to
major policy changes. The 1980s saw the return of neo-conservative state
policies guided by monetarism, which focused on the control of
inflation. Consequently, Canadian economic policy became concerned with
controlling the supply of money and reducing government spending
(especially deficits and borrowing), which together contributed to an
increase in unemployment.

McBride argues further, without offering strong evidence, that the
policies pursued by the Canadian state reflected the agenda of big
business, which argued for increased economic competitiveness. The
Canadian state relied on market forces to achieve this goal. However,
countries such as Japan and Switzerland that have pursued alternative
policy strategies have often experienced quite low unemployment. Hence
McBride concludes that “we have had high unemployment because the
Canadian state had chosen to have it. The strategy implemented by the
Canadian state inevitably produced high levels of unemployment.”

Although he does not develop an elaborate theory of the state, McBride
suggests that the state’s relationship to the problem of unemployment
tells us a great deal about the nature of the state in contemporary
capitalist society; he falls back on Marxist rhetoric and concludes that
state policy “represents a response to the articulated needs of
capital.”

At the end of this interesting book, the reader’s only wish is that
the author’s conclusions had been better supported with concrete
evidence.